Avoiding the innovation valley of death : Private sector commercialization of publicly funded research

Abstract: The Swedish Government annually distributes billions of SEK on different agencies, councils, and institutions with instructions to finance research initiatives that promote public benefit and Swedish competitiveness internationally. The expectations are that these initiatives are picked up by the private sector as soon as the research starts showing results and in this way reach all branches of society. Many companies actively utilize this to catch new innovations early but also to make use of research, so they do not have to finance these early phases themselves. With diverging incentives and many stakeholders from academia, public financiers, and the industry, it is often a long and bumpy road towards commercialization. The purpose of this study was primarily to identify obstacles and barriers that could arise along the road to commercialization. Secondly, it aims to map the aspects that need to be addressed and find out how to work around the barriers to increase the commercialization success rate. The study is performed with its basis in a large Swedish company within food science and agriculture that are currently active within the studied area. The study is built on three major methods; interviews, a survey, and a workshop. The interviews and the workshop was conducted with several representatives from the different groups of stakeholders such as project managers and industry supervisors, but also with less biased third parties such as external financiers and business coaches. The survey was deployed to researchers that has received public funding to conduct research within food science or agriculture. The interviews and the survey were aimed at mapping the different barriers but also at suggesting possible improvements meanwhile the workshop was aimed at providing insight to the interaction between the different stakeholders in a project. The results point to a variety of problems and barriers that need to be addressed to improve the outlook for co-funded R&D-projects. Amongst these, we found, for example lack of financial resources, collaboration between stakeholders, divergent goals, and business modeling. The results and the analysis also point to a number of measures to take within many of the areas that would help the projects. The primary conclusions of the study make up a model that takes project progress into account at the same time as it suggests proactive measures such as financing, goals, and collaboration as well as reactive measures such as business area integration and development companies to reduce the influence of the discovered barriers.